I run a large small business, by which I mean that it seems to require a tremendous amount of work for the money it makes. My company runs parks and campgrounds under concession contracts with public recreation authorities, and I am currently spending a lot of time helping various parks organizations keeps parks open in a world of declining budgets.
I have been an entrepreneur in Phoenix, Arizona for ten years, before which I worked from other people in companies as large as Exxon and as small as 3-person Internet startups. I have an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a mechanical engineering degree from Princeton University.
I was a relatively early entrant into the blogging world, writing a libertarian blog called Coyote Blog. I also blog at Climate-Skeptic.com on global warming and climate change issues and at ParkPrivatization.com on trends in recreation privatization. I have written a novel called "BMOC" and several books and videos on climate change.

8/25/2011 @ 11:36AM14,744 views

Did CLOUD Just Rain on the Global Warming Parade?

One of the hot topics, so to speak, in the global warming debate is allocating responsibility for 20th century warming between natural and man-made effects. This is harder than one might imagine — after all, no one’s thermometer has two readings, one for “natural” and one for “man-made.” This week, from CERN in Geneva, comes an important new study in this debate.

Global warming skeptics argue that only a portion, possibly a small portion, of recent warming is due to man-made CO2 and greenhouse gasses. Climate alarmists have, in turn, argued that all of 20th century warming, and more, was due to anthropogenic effects (if the “and more” is confusing, it means that some scientists believe that certain man-made and natural cooling effects actually reduced man-made warming below what it might have been.)

It is only in this context that Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick studies make even a bit of sense. After all, what do pre-industrial world temperature trends have anything to tell us about the effect of man-made Co2 on 20th century temperatures?

But Mann’s work had a very specific purpose — to make the case that the natural variability of temperatures, at least on a millennial scale, is very small. Though considered by many to be deeply flawed, Mann’s work seemed to say that the anecdotal historical record was wrong, that there was not a Medieval warm period or very cold period during the solar minima of the 17th and 18th centuries. In his hockey stick, the only significant trend in temperatures began with the industrial age, and man’s production of CO2.

Much of the debate revolves around the role of the sun, and though holding opposing positions, both skeptics and alarmists have had good points in the debate. Skeptics have argued that it is absurd to downplay the role of the sun, as it is the energy source driving the entire climate system. Michael Mann notwithstanding, there is good evidence that unusually cold periods have been recorded in times of reduced solar activity, and that the warming of the second half of the 20th century has coincided with a series of unusually strong solar cycles.

Global warming advocates have responded, in turn, that while the sun has indeed been more active in the last half of the century, the actual percentage change in solar irradiance is tiny, and hardly seems large enough to explain measured increases in temperatures and ocean heat content.

And thus the debate stood, until a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark suggested something outrageous — that cosmic rays might seed cloud formation. The implications, if true, had potentially enormous implications for the debate about natural causes of warming.

When the sun is very active, it can be thought of as pushing away cosmic rays from the Earth, reducing their incidence. When the sun is less active, we see more cosmic rays. This is fairly well understood. But if Svensmark was correct, it would mean that periods of high solar output should coincide with reduced cloud formation (due to reduced cosmic ray incidence), which in turn would have a warming effect on the Earth, since less sunlight would be reflected back into space by clouds.

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The “Hot House Theory” of global warming (as it was first known) was advanced by Joseph Fourier, the French physicist and mathematician in 1824 in a paper called “Remarques générales sur les Temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (Annales de Chimie et de Physique, pp. 136-167, Tome XXVII, Octobre 1824. Paris: Crochard). Here he argued the the moon showed radical changes in temperature between day and night while the earth showed much less change. He showed that the atmosphere acts like a blanket to trap heat, preventing the extremes of temperatures seen on the moon.

This theory made a substantial advancement in 1859 when John Tyndall, a remarkable physicist, mountaineer, and pioneering glaciologist, wrote a paper called “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption and Conduction” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, pp. 1-36, Vol. 151, Part I, 1861. The Bakerian Lecture. London: Taylor and Francis) wherein he wrote:”The solar heat possesses… the power of crossing an atmosphere; but, when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus, the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.” He showed that carbon dioxide and water vapors were the main agents trapping heat on a qualitative level.

In 1896 Dr. Svente Arrhenius, one of the most important scientists in history, puplished a paper called ”On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” (Philosophical Magazine 41, 237-276 – you can read the entire paper here

http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

It demonstrates quite conclusively the causation connection between in a quantitative fashion. Dr. Arrhenius shows that for each two fold increase in carbon dioxide, the average temperature of the earth’s surface will increase a few degrees. Since then, the concentration of carbon dioxide has in fact increased and the mean temperature of the surface of the earth has increased in pretty much the way Dr. Arrhenius said it would.

In 1906 Pr. Arrhenius wrote a book “Världarnas utveckling” (which was translated into English as “Worlds in the Making (1908)). There he wrote:””If the quantity of carbonic acid in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4°; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8°. On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth’s surface by 4°; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8°.” (p53)

“The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.” (p61)

Thus was born the theory of Anthropogenic Climatic Change (ACC), before Al Gore’s father was even born and none of it was funded by any government official anywhere.

The basic science is settled, all of the issues that you raise do not bring into question the almost 200 years of climatic and atmospheric science on which the ACC theory is based. This is a squabbling over the details.

Again Arrhenius cited no cause. He said the rise in CO2 corresponds with a rise in temperatures. So stop telling us that he cited a causal effect or misrepresenting his findings. Secondly, the amount of CO2 caused by Man has been increasing for a number of centuries, yet temperatures go up at certain times and then settle. For the last 12 years they have settled. But not CO2. Finally it is well known that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere procede from increasing temperatures. They do not precede them.

What’s being shown is that the IPCC’s model is heavily flawed. Mind you that it is the conclusions of the IPCC that all of these institutions are endorsing. Over the past few years, there have been many factors in their models that have been shown to be incorrect. However, instead of making adjustments accordingly to verify whether they make a difference, the claims have been met with denial where applicable and deemed irrelevant if not. They show that the science behind the IPCC’s findings are weak at worst, inconclusive at best.

Despite all of that, the IPCC has yet to acknowledge and correct it’s error in calculating the Earth’s effective temperature which led to an inaccurately low black-body temperature and thusly an overestimation of local effects upon the planet’s temperature.

In any other field of science, when confronted with an inaccuracy of the factors in your study, one would be expected to adjust accordingly and determine how it effects their results. The IPCC has yet to do this though. They have stood behind their initial results and fought tooth and nail against anything and anyone that contradicts them. They are vested in their result and that isn’t how science works. When you put your opinion before the facts, you cease to be a scientific entity and become a political one instead.

While you tend to use middle of the road reasonable tone, your quoting of Roy Spencer, and using other refuted skeptic arguments, like the sun, and your conclusions, led me to believe your nothing more than another anti-AGW contrarian guilded by presentation.

I will quote an actual real life Climate Scientist prediction with respect to the lauded blogosphere writers would say about CERN/CLOUD:

“It is eminently predictable that the published results will be wildly misconstrued by the contrarian blogosphere as actually proving this link. However, that would be quite wrong. ”

However, aerosol nucleation experiments are not usually front page news, and the likely high public profile of this paper is only loosely related to the science that is actually being done. Rather, the excitement is based on the expectation that this work will provide some insight into the proposed cosmic ray/cloud/climate link that Svensmark (for instance) has claimed is the dominant driver of climate change (though note he is not an author on this paper, despite an earlier affiliation with the project). Indeed, the first justification for the CLOUD experiment was that: “The basic purpose of the CLOUD detector … is to conﬁrm, or otherwise, a direct link between cosmic rays and cloud formation by measuring droplet formation in a controlled test-beam environment”. It is eminently predictable that the published results will be wildly misconstrued by the contrarian blogosphere as actually proving this link. However, that would be quite wrong.

We were clear in the 2006 post that establishing a significant GCR/cloud/climate link would require the following steps (given that we have known that ionisation plays a role in nucleation for decades). One would need to demonstrate:

… that increased nucleation gives rise to increased numbers of (much larger) cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) … and that even in the presence of other CCN, ionisation changes can make a noticeable difference to total CCN … and even if there were more CCN, you would need to show that this actually changed cloud properties significantly, … and that given that change in cloud properties, you would need to show that it had a significant effect on radiative forcing.

Of course, to show that cosmic rays were actually responsible for some part of the recent warming, you would need to show that there was actually a decreasing trend in cosmic rays over recent decades – which is tricky, because there hasn’t been (see the figure).

Warren – why do you ignore the most important element of the Michael Mann Hockey Stick? The crux of Mann’s behavior is that he INTENTIONALLY OMITTED the Medieval Warming Period, AND he intentionally DID NOT DISCLOSE that fact, until he was CAUGHT with his pants down. That is when he came up with the ALIBI that he thought that it was scientifically sound to eliminate that important period as an anomaly. You also FAIL to mention that the CLOUD experiment is a higher level of investigation, precisely beause it is an EXPERIMENT, not a computer model that incorporates the biases of the pseudo AGW scammers.

I really wish it was not so politicized. It is so hard to find real answers about real concerns about global warming. I am definitely a skeptic, but I am not a denier. I have so many questions about it that neither side can give me a non-BS answer.

Also working with some one who got a government grant way back when, he talked to me at length how politics and money for science play into everything. It is frustrating.

I want real answers. Like I said, I do believe man has had an impact, but how much of one? Is it really that significant?